Daniel Bliss

Daniel Bliss 1823-1916, American missionary, b. Franklin co., Vt., founder of Syrian Protestant College (now the American Univ. of Beirut) in Lebanon. He went to Syria in 1855, returning in 1862 to secure funds and a charter for the college, which was opened in 1866; he was its president until 1902. His son, Howard Sweetser Bliss, 1860-1920, b. Syria, grad. Amherst, 1882, and Union Theological Seminary, 1887, succeeded him as president and enlarged and liberalized the college.

Bibliography: See D. Bliss's Reminiscences (ed. by his son, 1920).

Revivalism, the periodic movement of shared religious intensity in Protestant churches by which believers are spiritually renewed and outsiders are called to repentance and Christian faith. A feature of evangelical Protestantism, revivals derive from several basic evangelical assumptions, including the conviction that all are sinners whose only hope for eternal salvation is in repentance and conversion, the emphasis on preaching, and the widespread influence of a pietist stress on religion of the heart.

In the Colonial Era, revivals were often considered to come at God's discretion rather than as the result of human effort. Early American Puritans believed that hardships like natural calamities, plagues, or Indian raids represented God's judgments on a community that had broken faith with God's law. As in the Old Testament, repentance, fasting, and prayer with a renewed commitment to “walk in God's ways” were one prescribed response. “Seasons of awakening” followed in scattered parishes in seventeenth‐century America. The first general religious revival came early in the eighteenth century, first appearing among the Dutch in the Middle Colonies in the 1720s, in New England in the 1730s and 1740s, and intermittently in the southern colonies until the Revolutionary War.

This revival was so widespread, intense, and remarkable that it came to be known as the Great Awakening. The travels and preaching of the British evangelist George Whitefield gave a degree of unity to widely scattered religious stirrings. At times, the Great Awakening was marked by intense emotional outbursts. Its ablest American defender, chronicler, and theologian was Jonathan Edwards. The revival augmented the membership rolls of the churches, created and divided congregations, and fostered a new degree of intercolonial communication and cooperation. Detractors objected to the emotionalism and unrestrained “enthusiasm” that seemed to threaten standards of truth and decorum.

After the Revolutionary War, another religious revival emerged. Once again, although it began locally, it spread to many parts of the country and so became known as the Second Great Awakening. In parts of New England, it spread through local congregations from the 1790s, manifesting itself in concern for religion, responsiveness to preaching, increased church attendance, and greater attention to public morality. In these early manifestations, it was not often marked by the emotional excesses that had troubled the critics of the First Great Awakening.

In the first decade of the nineteenth century, revival gripped Yale University's student body, shaping the careers of some of the century's most prominent religious leaders. Again, this seemed a “surprising work of God,” an unpredictable phenomenon in which God graciously chose to renew the church by converting sinners and renewing believers. By 1810, the revival had stimulated the formation of the first American foreign missionary association, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and the first foreign missionaries had sailed for India.

In the West, the Second Great Awakening's defining moment came at a camp meeting near Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801. Marked by spontaneous preaching that generated intensely emotional responses, camp meetings became a favored means for revival. An array of voluntary associations supporting home and foreign missions, Bible and tract societies, Sunday schools, and social reform movements owed much to the Second Great Awakening. Whereas leadership in the First Great Awakening had been Congregationalist, Presbyterian, and Baptist, the Second Great Awakening, especially in the West was strongly influenced by Baptists and Methodists.

In the 1820s, Charles G. Finney helped routinize revivals. Revivals resulted from the right use of the right means, Finney believed; they would happen whenever right conditions prevailed. Acting on this assumption, Finney became the first of many nationally known revivalists. His Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835) became standard reading for those who longed for personal and national spiritual renewal.

After the Civil War, Dwight L. Moody dominated revivalism. With his chorister Ira D. Sankey, who gave impetus to the use of gospel songs in revival services, Moody crisscrossed the United States and enjoyed enormous popularity in Britain. Successful revivalists among Moody's contemporaries included Daniel Whittle, Philip Paul Bliss, and Maria B. Woodworth‐Etter, who traveled the country with a tent, praying for the sick and attracting large crowds. These national figures worked in conjunction with area churches so the converts of citywide revivals could join local congregations. At the same time, denominational and independent revivalists conducted local revival meetings. By 1900, revivalism had become a major tool of evangelical churches. Thousands of congregations held annual and semiannual revivals.

The proliferation of lesser known evangelists did not diminish the importance of national revivalists. In the twentieth century, Billy Sunday, Aimee Semple McPherson, and Billy Graham spoke to ever larger crowds and used new media, including television, to expand their efforts. By the end of the century, the terms “evangelist” and “revivalist” were almost interchangeable. Evangelism—converting the unsaved—perhaps more than renewal of the church, had come to be the heart of revivalism.
See also Chautauqua Movement; Great Awakening, First and Second; Methodism; Missionary Movement; Pentecostalism; Protestantism; Puritanism; Religion; Televangelism.

Bibliography

Edwin S. Gaustad , The Great Awakening in New England, 1957.
William G. McLoughlin , Modern Revivalism, 1959.
William G. McLoughlin , Revivals, Awakenings and Reform, 1978.
Keith J. Hardman , Charles Grandison Finney, 1792–1875: Revivalist and Reformer, 1987.
Harry Stout , The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism, 1991.

Edith L. Blumhofer

English language. Together with Norman‐ French, English first came into Ireland with the Anglo‐Norman invasion. Although its use declined with the Gaelicization of large sections of the settler community, it maintained some currency in the Pale and in the larger towns, as well as in two rural areas, Fingall (a district north of Dublin; see fine gall), and the baronies of Forth and Bargy in Co. Wexford. This decline was reversed with the distribution of English speakers throughout most of the country during the plantations (c.1550 onwards). Hiberno‐English in its present state traces its development from the plantations, when large numbers of English settlers came over to Ireland as managers or tenants in estates and manorial houses.

From then on, the use of English became more widespread, helped by government policies, including the penal laws, which ensured that the native Irish‐speaking population came to regard their own vernacular, together with other elements of their culture, as symbols of failure. Other events confirmed this perception. The Act of Union of 1800 enhanced the prestige and usefulness of English for those going over to West‐minister. Daniel O'Connell used English as his means of mass communication; the national schools used English as the medium for instruction, and deliberately discouraged Irish. There was also the Great Famine, in which so many monoglot speakers of Irish perished, and the ensuing rise in emigration to countries in which English was the vernacular.

Today there are no monoglot speakers of Irish, even in those areas, known as Gaeltachtaí, in which Irish is the common medium of speech. The English language is the principal vernacular and the dialect is known as ‘Hiberno‐English’, which is chiefly characterized by its conservatism (currently employing such archaic or obsolescent English words as ‘cog’, to cheat in an exam, or ‘delph’ for crockery), its wide appropriation of words from Irish (e.g. ‘ommadhawn’ for fool, ‘gorsoon’ for boy), its retention of older pronunciations (e.g. ‘tae’ for tea, the aspiration of words beginning with ‘wh’), as well as the adoption of Irish sounds for the pronunciation of vowels and consonants (e.g. ‘tree’ for three). The range of verbal possibilities in Hiberno‐English is also increased by its adoption of non‐standard patterns, deriving from Irish, in its verbal system (e.g. ‘I do be’, to signal habituality or ‘I was after getting married’, which reflects the absence of the verb ‘to have’ in Irish).

See also language.

Bibliography

Bliss, A. J. , Spoken English in Ireland 1600–1740 (1979)
Dolan, T. P. , A Dictionary of Hiberno‐English: The Irish Use of English (rev. edn. 2004) Use of English (rev. edn. 2004)
—(ed.), ‘The English of the Irish’, Special Issue, Irish University review, 20 (1990)
—and Ó Muirithe, Diarmaid, The Dialect of Forth and Bargy, Co. Wexford (1996)

Terence Dolan